Author Topic: Unknown artist for every song  (Read 2225 times)

DieHardBarrett

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All of my songs display "unknown artist". But for every song (in windows file explorer) I have the correct "album artist" labeled. How do I get MusicBee to interpret the file's "album artist" for MusicBee's "artist"? This way the artist biography works too. I included two pictures to show exactly what i mean. Thank you in advance!

https://ibb.co/cgg5vSV

https://ibb.co/cJnL2Nc
Last Edit: October 20, 2021, 10:47:35 PM by psychoadept

psychoadept

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Hi, welcome to the forum!

I took the img tags off your links, because they're to the container pages and not the images themselves.

MusicBee will infer Album Artist from the Artist value but not the other way around.  The easiest solution to your problem would be to use the Additional Tagging & Reporting Tools plugin to copy Album Artist to Album, which that plugin will let you do for as many files at once as you need to. (Test with a few first to make sure it works as expected!)
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frankz

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You'll need to tag your files with an artist.  You can either use the auto-tagging function in MB to do this, do it manually, or this plug-in can mass-copy them if that's what you want to do (I wouldn't).

DieHardBarrett

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Oh... I removed the "contributing artist" field for all of my songs (in windows) since it was causing an issue with my phone app which i use more. So is there any way around this issue without changing the file itself? I saw something about virtual tags on the forums but idk anything about that.

psychoadept

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No, not really. Artist is a very standard tag used by almost all music software. What kind of problem were you having with it?
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DieHardBarrett

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It detects "contributing artist" as a feature and puts it after "album artist". Removing "contributing artist" fixed that. On musicbee I've corrected the now playing and popup to display "album artist" instead. The only thing left to fix is "artist biography". Is there a way to set it to "album artist biography"? Lol if not, ill live without it.

frankz

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There is not a way because everyone uses artist without difficulty.

If there's a problem with your phone app reading the standard, widely-used artist tag,  IMO you're better off figuring out what the problem there is and finding a solution for it and then tagging your files correctly than you are mistagging your files to get around it.  In the long run.

DieHardBarrett

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I see what you're saying and i agree. But there is no "Artist" field in windows. Its either "contributing artist" which is a feature of the song, or "album artist" the artist that released the album. So according to Windows and my phone app, i am tagging my files correctly. It appears musicbee is interpreting the feature of a song as the main artist. Thats why i figured there was a setting i could change to correct it.

frankz

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Just a little friendly advice from someone who has been tagging a digital library for 20+ years.  Use it or don't - I'm not here to convince you, just inform you.

Bee-liever

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Oh... I removed the "contributing artist" field for all of my songs (in windows) since it was causing an issue with my phone app which i use more.
What Windows displays as "contributing artist" is the "artist" tag.
So to get around your phone app not working correctly, you have removed the "artist" tag from all your files.
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